An Air Algerie flight has crashed en route from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to Algiers with 110 passengers on board, almost half of them French citizens, officials say.

An Algerian official told Reuters the plane had crashed en route to Algiers, but declined to give details of where the plane was or what caused the accident.

Burkina Faso's transport minister Jean Bertin Ouedrago said the aircraft asked to change route on Thursday at 1:38am GMT (11:38am AEST) because of a storm in the area.

Two French fighter jets based in the region have been dispatched to try to locate the airliner along its probable route, a French army spokesman said.

Niger security sources said planes were flying over the border region with Mali to search for the flight.

Algeria's state news agency APS said authorities lost contact with flight AH5017 an hour after it took off from Burkina Faso, but other officials gave differing accounts of the times of contact, adding to confusion about the fate of the flight and where it might be.

Swiftair, the private Spanish company that owns the aircraft, confirmed it had lost contact with the MD-83 operated by Air Algerie, which it said was carrying 110 passengers and six crew.

Whatever its fate, the loss of contact is likely to add to nerves in the airline industry after a Malaysia Airlines plane was downed over Ukraine last week, a TransAsia Airways crashed off Taiwan during a thunderstorm on Wednesday and airlines cancelled flights into Tel Aviv due to the conflict in Gaza.

An Air Algerie representative in Burkina Faso, Kara Terki, told a news conference that all the passengers on the plane were in transit, either for Europe, the Middle East or Canada.

He said the passenger list included 50 French, 24 Burkinabe, eight Lebanese, four Algerians, two from Luxembourg, one Belgian, one Swiss, one Nigerian, one Cameroonian, one Ukrainian and one Romanian.

Lebanese officials said there were at least 10 Lebanese citizens on the flight.

A spokeswoman for SEPLA, Spain's pilots union, said the six crew were from Spain. She could not give any further details.

Search underway in Mali

Swiftair said on its website the aircraft took off from Burkina Faso on Thursday at 1:17am GMT (11:17am AEST) and was supposed to land in Algiers at 5:10am GMT (3:10pm AEST) but never reached its destination.

An Algerian aviation official said the last contact Algerian authorities had with the aircraft was at 1:55am GMT (11:55am AEST) on Thursday when it was flying over Gao, Mali.

Aviation authorities in Burkina said they handed the flight to the control tower in Niamey, Niger, at 1:38am GMT (11:38am AEST).

They said the last contact with the flight was just after 3:30am GMT (1:30pm AEST) Thursday.